[1 of 5] Detecting Growth in Language (pages preface -10) by James Moffett (1992)

Author: James Moffett Curated by Jonathan M. Marine and Paul Rogers

Moffett, James. “‘Preface,’ ‘Alternatives to Standardized Testing,’ ‘Making Thought with Language,’ and ‘A Model of Mental Growth.’” Detecting Growth in Language, Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., Portsmouth, NH, 1992, p. Preface-10.

Preface

This book is meant to help K-12 teachers assess verbal learning without external tests, by their own observations of learner activities and products. Now that the destructive nature of standardized tests has been well documented and recognized, especially in the indi-vidualized, interactive, and integrated programs advocated today, it becomes more important than ever for teachers to learn how to detect growth constantly as they witness students discussing or performing, read or hear their writing, watch or listen to their tapes, listen in on or sit in with groups, confer with individuals, and register individuals’ patterns of choice in their activities, materials, and partners.

Since particular observations are infinite, all I can do here is suggest some general signs of growth to look for, or perhaps more accurately, some general ways of looking. I trust teachers’ experience and native perception to fill in a great deal. The world of verbal learning is so large and intricate, however, that some developmentally significant ways of breaking it down and conceptualizing it should prove useful. To facilitate getting a mental handle on these ways of viewing growth, I have crystallized the discussion of each in a culminating sentence. So some two dozen of these boldfaced “growth sequences” periodically pull together the text.

Personal judgment may be subjective, as it has to be for assessing verbal growth, but it can be informed by teachers’ cumulative experience with many different learners if thought about in the framework of ideas that follow here.

Alternatives to Standardized Testing

External testing is no more necessary for learning in school than for learning out of school. It does not benefit those in the classroom, who can better assess in other ways. Standardized tests exist for people outside the classroom—for administrators and the public. All they do is compare one student or school or school system with another. This serves only to create mischief. Parents have a right to know how much schools are helping their children to learn, but they can ascertain this better from seeing their children’s work and from talking with them. In good learning environments, students create a lot, which means that there is a lot for parents and administrators, as well as students and teachers, to see.

The way the public actually judges schools is by real performance in the world out of school, not by test scores, which mean little beyond academic walls. The most telling fact is that even students who once scored high and got high grades in, say, math or science remember too little to apply them later when they really need them. The complaints of employers and of graduates themselves tell us more than tests do. How well can the citizenry deal with ideas, communicate and collaborate with colleagues, make sense and use of texts, vote knowledgeably, and conceive solutions to problems?

Assessment experts, it’s true, are working to make external evaluation more sophisticated than the crude multiple-choice, computer-scorable tests that have always shrunk the curriculum to fit themselves. Such experts repudiate standardized tests as we have known them and claim to be able to design testing activities that will do justice to any learning goal. But tests simple and cheap enough to permit comparison and to administer universally can never do justice to the depth and complexity of what educators are calling “higher literacy” and “critical and creative thinking” or “higher-order thinking.” Furthermore, the more nearly such testing activities might succeed in assessing these desirable mental activities, the more nearly they would approximate the actual real-life performances themselves, in which case there’s no need for special testing circum-stances, since these performances can be observed where they authentically occur in and out of school.

In other words, if students are learning by doing, by practicing the target activities themselves, then anyone can evaluate by observing daily learning, because the learning and evaluating activities are one and the same. We can assess these activities by whatever means and standards we are all judging schools in society at large when we defend or indict them. This is ideal—if, again, the learning activities are the target activities themselves, not exercises alleged to lead to these goals. The most efficient education would never require of learners that they do anything especially for evaluation that they would not be doing anyway in order to learn. Furthermore, if special testing activity is required, it betrays the learning goals to the extent that it differs from them. And in order to accommodate the special conditions and costs of mass measurement, it must differ a great deal.

National assessment exists to embarrass schools into improvement by comparing scores. This assumes that dereliction is the problem and competition the answer. It’s a crude, moralistic, negative approach. What evidence exists that the threat of getting beaten will spur and cure schools? The fact is that, as much as anything, this very authoritarian approach has demoralized teachers and princi-pals, who simply never have had decision-making power commensurate with responsibility for the results, because tests and texts-the major determinants of curriculum-are usually selected over their heads, if not behind their backs. Perhaps the first reason schools have found improvement so difficult is that state and district legal requirements have built standardized tests into the curriculum and into textbook adoptions so that everybody has to teach to the tests and ignore both their personal expertise and the urging of their professional organizations.

The movement toward site management aims precisely to offset such top-down governance in the local districts by delegating decision-making powers to schools and neighborhoods. But the states and the federal government are neutralizing this movement by pushing national testing farther than it has ever gone before. The presidency and the governorships seem far less willing than the local districts to give power to the grassroots, perhaps because they don’t have to live with, or can’t see as well, the negative consequences of their efforts to control education through testing. Proponents of national assessment reiterate that participation in this competitive testing is voluntary, but they know perfectly well that when state and federal government throws its weight behind something, parents and communities will clamor to have it in their district. Actually, district and state school systems, like the individual students in them, differ far too much in far too many ways for scores to show who is and isn’t doing a good job. The reasons for poor performance go far beyond mere reprehensible character. The whole idea of improving an institution by showing it up is negative and unfair. The legislators and other politicians who are adopting this get-tough policy to weed out incompetents are the very ones who have been, in effect, blocking educational improvement for decades already by decreeing assessment and procurement policies that conflict with what the best teachers are trying to do.

The official argument goes that if government permits site management and parental choice, then the educational results have to be measured against state and federal standards, to protect students from local ignorance or incompetence. But standards don’t have to be set by tests and in fact cannot be set by tests, because standards are ideas of excellence that will always exceed what standardized instruments can afford to measure. Whether norm-referenced or criterion-referenced, furthermore, tests must allow most students to pass and therefore must anchor learning to low standards—an unnecessary self-contradiction caused by the insistence on competition. When an individual’s progress is measured only against his or her past, standards do not have to be pegged low enough to accommodate masses. Comparing individuals against each other hampers everyone’s progress by creating distracting self-concepts. Incessantly testing students, finally, amounts to putting them on probation throughout their youth. This creates chronic problems of low self-esteem and resentment toward schools, which should be there, after all, to serve them, not to shame and intimidate them.

How can we set standards without tests? Well, where do the criteria for tests come from if not from prior notions of what to look for in growth? It is these notions of growth in certain areas that provide standards. This is why I have emphasized in this book the detecting of growth in language-perceptive observation. It is an effort to describe signs of verbal growth that educators and parents may look for. Most of these kinds of growth, which I have tried to summarize periodically in italicized statements, could not be transformed into acceptable tests even were that a good idea.

Furthermore, some kinds of growth occur in the parts of dis-course—like vocabulary or sentence structure—so that if tested in isolation, as is the traditional practice, would perpetuate exercises with them in isolation. Teaching to tests inevitably causes learning activities and conditions to resemble testing activities and condi-tions. But an observer can notice how a student is developing in the substructures of discourse without isolating these in the student’s mind. In fact, such in situ observation allows the evaluator precisely to assess how a student is interplaying parts so as to create meaningful wholes. This holistic complexity of thought and speech is exactly what standardized testing will never measure.

Standardized tests rank students or schools but don’t troubleshoot the problems of either individuals or institutions. Language educators need to learn what to look for so as to become more expert assessors and counselors in the learning process. In organic, student-centered language learning such as I have advocated else-where,* these two roles are synonymous. In order to guide students who are creating individual curricula while interacting with others, teachers have to evaluate constantly and have to teach students to do the same. All are charting past and future together on the basis of what previous activities have been worth and what is needed next.

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* See Student-Centered Language Arts, K-12, James Moffett and Betty Jane Wagner, 4th edition, 1992 Boynton/Cook, Portsmouth, NH.

The chapter in it titled “Evaluating” also elaborates some of the issues and processes touched on in this book. Consult the chapters there on talking, improvising, performing, reading, and writing for specific things to look for in each of these activities.

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So both products and processes are examined all the time as members of reading and writing groups confer about texts, as writing is responded to and disseminated, as work folders fill up for perusal, and as texts are given rehearsed readings or otherwise performed live.

Discussions, improvisations, performances, writing workshops, and all sorts of projects can be frequently audiotaped and videotaped for several purposes at once—to allow participants to critique them-selves, to furnish material for teacher in-service discussions, to orient new students to these activities, and to show people outside the classroom what is going on inside. Many of these tapes may serve only temporarily and then be recorded over. Others may be saved along with selections from writing portfolios and other tangible products to provide more lasting records. Doing both accommodates random, slice-of-life sampling of the whole curriculum and tracing of individual growth.

The point is to have plenty to look at so that any party can evaluate for any purpose. Observing processes as well as examining products permits realistic troubleshooting. Yet none of these activities exists only for assessment; they are all learning processes. They are the target activities, the goals themselves of speaking, reading, writing, and thinking—of communicating, collaborating, decision-making, problem-solving, creating, and interpreting texts-not some exercises that are means only, alleged to eventuate sometime in these goals. What you’re seeing is what you’re getting.

Whether external testing simply disappears in the future, or whether it does indeed become identical with the learning activities that are the goals, perceptive observation will emerge as the central means of evaluating. Assessment reformers today base their claim to be able to measure higher thinking on what they call the three Ps—performances, portfolios, and projects. If they succeed, they will be assessing in the routine classroom or workplace, not in special examination circumstances on rare occasions under conditions that permit numerical comparisons. The three Ps sound very good, if they are authentic language activities as practiced out of school. Perform-ances, portfolios, and projects make up the kind of curriculum this book presupposes. Made available in some slice-of-life form to out-siders, they offer real alternatives to the old multiple-choice tests for external examination. In any case, they all depend on observers knowing how to look and how to think about what they see.

Freed from emceeing to observe in their own classroom, teachers can note personal traits and trends, comment on these as needed during conferences with students and parents, and write reports if required. When students are doing different things according to personal experience and choice, they look different because they create individual patterns that are far more distinctive than test-score profiles. Teachers know more surely how to coach, confer, and counsel toward improvement. The descriptions of growth spelled out in this book aim to help teachers think about what to look for.

Some of the most important signs of verbal growth are certain habits, attitudes, and feelings too obvious to dwell on here but necessary to reaffirm. Well-developing language learners will feel more at ease speaking, reading, and writing and will consequently increase their fluency and pleasure in these areas. By exploring what oracy and literacy can do, students will increasingly appreciate the multiple uses of language to socialize, play, communicate, think, and create. By finding out the limitations of language, they will discriminate between occasions for words and occasions for silence. Confidence and curiosity increase. Choices multiply. Expression acquires verve and subtlety; interpretation, justness. Thinking broadens and deepens. Let’s never forget to look for and register major human developments in expression and understanding as we break these down now into more specific things to detect.

Matching Thought with Language

Any researcher who has tried to measure the effect of some teaching treatment on the growth of thought and speech knows what easy-scoring standardized tests ignore-that the presence or absence of a certain word or sentence structure does not necessarily indicate the presence or absence of certain thinking. The fact that people use the word because does not mean that they understand causality, for many small children use the word before they grasp the concept. The chief issue of assessment, in fact, is distinguishing between true growth and hollow verbalism.

The idea of causality, on the other hand, may be expressed in a discourse without the word because appearing in it. Concepts of relations especially are often conveyed “between the lines” by con-text. Juxtaposition and punctuation may convey the cause-and-effect relation: “He decided to leave; he knew they wanted to be alone.” Omitting because makes the logic more implicit and gains the rhetorical advantage of understatement. If we were to measure growth by counting this author’s logical conjunctions we would score her low because of her more sophisticated composing!

How do you offset this lack of one-to-one correlation between thought and language? On any one occasion you probably can’t, because you don’t have enough to go on. The smaller the sample of discourse, the greater the problem. To judge language growth, you have to sample a learner’s speech on many different occasions and make a composite judgment.

Thought is invisible until it is translated into deeds or words. So while intellectual growth is more important, you most often have to detect it as manifested in language, because language incarnates thought. Since the language half is all we can see, we are much tempted to forget this invisible thought that it is being matched off with and even forget the whole process of matching. Too often teachers just focus on language forms as if these existed alone.

There are several reasons why thought and language cannot be matched off in predictable, standard ways. First of all, thought is more various; it is too big for words. The possibilities of what many individual human minds can conceive and combine are greater than the permutations possible with a single lexicon and grammar, although creative use of language, as in poetry, bends language to fit the mind.

Second, before less-developed learners have learned how to use all the resources of language, they must make shift to cast their thought into language by any means they can. So they will express their thinking in more ambiguous, less differentiated forms of language than if they knew how to employ all its resources.

Third, language does not exist merely to convey thought; besides its logical function it has a rhetorical function, to exert some kind of force on other people. So many of the choices speakers and writers make in composing aim to have an effect on other people, not just to express ideas. This justifies making an important distinction between abstracting from some raw source and abstracting for a certain audience.

Fourth, any shift of thought from one medium to another necessitates loss and slippage. Language can only do certain things. Like any medium, it has its limits. In fact, it is most likely true that language can never do complete justice to thought, especially the subtlest, deepest, most original thought. Mathematical language and symbolic logic were developed, in fact, to offset some of the logical deficiencies of ordinary language, as figurative language has served to symbolize “ineffable” feeling and intuition. Other media may be more successful sometimes in rendering certain kinds of nonlinear, nondiscursive perception. Language is a flexible mold, however, and growth consists of finding out just how much, and which kinds of, thought language can indeed render.

Finally, language arts are arts, and many of the options about how to put thought into speech are aesthetic choices for the sake of wit, play, economy, beauty, and so on. At the same time we put our thinking into words we are often also playing games with the medium somewhat for game’s sake, as in painting, photography, dance, and other arts. Practitioners “make statements” in those media but also just use the media as wherewithal with which to compose form. We have to think of language as both means and end and look for growth at once in communication effectiveness and in word play.

A Model of Mental Growth

Because teachers of composition and comprehension necessarily deal with the putting of thought into speech and the interpreting of speech into thought, they need a model of mental growth. They are not concerned with language alone. Problems of composition and comprehension have to be resolved between thought and speech as students try to match one with the other. The nature of language, moreover, influences thinking. The model of growth that educators choose makes a critical difference in how everyone involved thinks about learning.

The growth model assumed in much traditional schooling is based on nineteenth-century physics and the industrial assembly line. According to this mechanical model, an educated student is a “product” issuing from one end of a closed system into which he and some other inert materials were fed. Knowledge structures are assembled by putting small parts together to make subassemblies that are in turn put together to make the finished product. The upshot is that students can’t see the woods for the trees. They are usually working on parts, without knowing why, and too seldom experience fully functioning communication in school. One falsity in this model is that in reality a child is more maker than made.

It’s important, whatever the model, that it depict growth sequence as cumulative, not linear. Don’t picture growth as a ladder or a series of stepping-stones, because these metaphors imply that learners leave behind old learning as they acquire new. Most learning is never shed but, rather, becomes assimilated or transformed into more advanced skills and knowledge. Imagine growth as a circle that becomes filled with more and more detailed and inter-fused figures.

Biology is the most appropriate field from which to draw a model of education, because mental growth parallels the growth of the total organism, in which it occurs. The best model of mental growth is the human embryo. It grows from a single cell to an extraordinarily intricate organism without ever being anything less than a whole and without ever functioning any other way than as a whole. A fertilized human egg is a human being before elaboration. What it is to become is already coded genetically within and will unfold through interaction with the environment. As the French expression says, “The more it changes the more it is the same thing”-that is, the more it fulfills what is has always been latently. It effects change by differentiating itself into limbs and organs, and it sustains itself across change by interrelating these parts by nerves and blood vessels as fast as they become articulated. The beauty of embryonic-and of mental-development lies in the great biological principle of simultaneous differentiation and integration.

At birth the mind of a child is integral with the world, because it has never had to deal with the world. Just as the child’s body partook of the mother’s body its mind partook of surroundings with no consciousness of separation. Marvelous faculties of reason like classifying and inferring exist already in potential state but lie dor-mant, pending the environmental exchanges that will activate them.

Cut off from the mother the child begins to become conscious of itself. Thrust up against physical and social realities, the child begins to construct an ego to negotiate with the things and people it is now starting to feel separate from. Distinguishing one’s organism from one’s environment—-perhaps the real trauma of birth—is the archetype of all differentiating. As it differentiates self from world, the child also differentiates the mind into thoughts that match the way the physical and social worlds are broken down. For safety and satisfaction, it has to learn to make distinctions to tell the difference between one thing and another. It learns to analyze, in other words, or, more accurately, its experience activates its inborn ability to analyze.

Humpty Dumpty’s fall symbolizes this breakup of the egg’s primal unity and simplicity into the inevitable differentiation an organism must undergo if it is to survive. The higher the animal the more its survival depends on acting differently toward different things— on flexibility-and hence the more it must differentiate its own insides into specialized parts. Growth means moving away from an initial lumping together, which in the mental realm some psychologists call global thinking. (Vestiges of it will hound students and teachers for years to come in the form of undiscriminated, unde-tailed, unrelated, unexplained ideas.)

Humpty Dumpty’s problem is not that he broke himself down but that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put him back together again. The other half of growth is integration. As an egg Humpty Dumpty indeed cannot be put back together. An egg has to change into something else, and integrating new parts is actually reintegrating. The differences emerging because of the breakdown must constantly be restructured. After a certain stage, nutrients no longer diffuse directly throughout protoplasm; gastrointestinal organs evolve to specialize in processing nutrients, and these organs must form a sequence among themselves, so that each does its job successively, and must form other appropriate relations with heart, lungs, brain, and so on to coordinate functions.

As the embryo must integrate the organs and vessels it articulates for fending and foraging in the environment outside the womb, the mind must organize the concepts and statements into which it is breaking thought down for matching it to material and social realities. The mind must synthesize parts into wholes at the same time it analyzes the whole into parts. Brain research suggests, in fact, that one reason for the brain having two hemispheres is so that it can specialize in both functions at once. Usually the left hemisphere (in most right-handed people) undertakes to analyze and the right to synthesize. The more differences the mind distinguishes, the more relating it must conceive in order to coordinate the parts as a whole. The mind must see the unlikeness of things existing in their unique state of concreteness and yet see likeness among things as reordered out of time and space into the abstract realm of thought. In its original global state of mind, the child is no more aware of similarity than of difference, because perception of one depends on perception of the other. Analysis and synthesis together create the complexity, the higher organization, that characterizes growth.

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